‘Howard The Duck’: The Oral History

With characters like Spider-Man, The Avengers, and the X-Men as a part of the catalog, it’s surprising that Howard the Duck marked the first time a Marvel comic book character made the leap from the illustrated page to the silver screen. The wisecracking, sarcastic, beer-drinking anti-hero made for an unlikely comic success story, but throughout the mid- to late-1970s, he was. Howard starred in a short-lived newspaper comic strip, and even launched a presidential campaign (under the cleverly named “All-Night Party”) in ’76, but his primary residence was in the comic book shops across the United States.

Photo: Universal

George Lucas was an early believer in Howard and, unlike almost any other fan, was in the unique position to help bring the foul-mouthed fowl to the big screen. After several challenges securing the rights and finding the right studio interested in taking Howard under its wing, Universal green lighted the movie. The husband and wife duo of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (pictured right, along with Lucas), both friends and professional associates of Lucas’s, dating back to their days at USC School of Cinematic Arts, wrote the script. Howard also signed on to direct, while Gloria would produce. The trio was previously nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for American Graffiti. Howard, it seemed, was on the path to greatness.

$37 million later – nearly $78 million in today’s dollars – Howard’s goose was cooked upon its arrival in the summer of 1986. Despite an aggressive promotional campaign, critics lambasted the movie; Caryn James of The New York Times gave the film perhaps its best (albeit VERY mixed) review, describing Howard as “a pleasant enough spoof for 45 minutes or so”. Audiences, too, opted for other fare, as the film only grossed $16.3 million at the domestic box office and another $21.7MM overseas, barely recouping its budget.

But after thirty years, Howard is finally getting a second look. The character is currently starring in a new comic book series and had a brief cameo in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, much to the enthusiasm of fans worldwide. Once a very secret society, Howard the Duck fans have found camaraderie on the Internet and at comic cons.

With another wisecracking, sarcastic, beer-drinking anti-hero based on a Marvel comic – Deadpool – recently breaking box office records, and the thirtieth anniversary edition of Howard the Duck upon us (out yesterday on Blu-ray), the time is perfect to catch up with many of the principal cast and crew to look back at the making of one of the most infamous movies of all-time.

PART I: “IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS…HOWARD THE DUCK!” – The Voice of the Cosmos

Willard Huyck (director, co-writer): Gloria (Katz) and I used to have lunch with George while he was doing post-production on Star Wars at a deli in the Valley, and next door happened to be a comic book store. One day we were going to be late, so he went over bought the first issue of Howard the Duck. We had never heard of it, but he showed it to us and said, “You know, this would make a great movie.” We thought it was an outrageous idea. By the mid-1980s we were pitching to a number of studios. Because George was very hot at the time, they were all very polite and interested, but Universal really wanted it.

Gloria Katz (co-producer, co-writer): This was before Roger Rabbit. We had been talking to George about this for about ten years, and anticipated animating it, but it would have taken too much time and too much money.

Jeffrey Jones (“Dr. Walter Jenning / Dark Overlord of the Universe”):Howard was supposed to be a totally new technical advance in film. When I was recruited to be in Howard the Duck, he was going to be a computer generated character and it didn’t work. We were at Industrial Light & Magic for a reason. ILM made what ultimately became Pixar, and that’s what they were working towards. Willard and Gloria pulled the trigger on the film, but couldn’t make it work. My understanding was that it was going to have a kind of a serious undertone, like Stranger in a Strange Land, with the takeaway being that Howard is as much of a human as anyone else – except he’s a duck.

Willard Huyck: We had written a whole different script. George’s idea was to not have an origin story. We had Howard as a private eye in Hawaii, and the audience would just have to accept that as normal, but the studio said, “No, you have to explain how he got here.”

Val Mayerik (original illustrator and co-creator of Howard the Duck comic): I had long since not worked on the character. I wasn’t really that connected to it, but Steve Gerber [the creator of the Howard The Duck character] and I talked about the film before it was out. He didn’t have terribly high hopes for it, and wasn’t involved at all. He wasn’t a consultant. My initial response was, “Oh man, this isn’t going to work.” I just had a feeling it was going to be silly and they weren’t going to get the edge that Steve put in it in the books.

Gloria Katz: We didn’t have enough time. You wait for these executives to read the script, and every week that goes by will cost more in the long run. We were finally we were given a “go” in May of ’85 and the duck had not been built. We had to start shooting in October for a summer release. It was a very tight schedule for that kind of production.

Director William Huyck reviews the script in between shots.Photo: Universal

Willard Huyck: We went to very serious legal meetings at Disney about whether Howard the Duck was stealing his look from Donald Duck. We put our models on the conference tables and all these lawyers would look at them. They’d say, “Well, it still looks like Donald,” and we’d say, “They’re wearing different clothes.” They’d say, “Can the bill be a little flatter or a little thicker?” They really got into it. We had to keep redesigning the duck.

Gloria Katz: Howard was going to be completely computerized, but that failed and those designers were fired. Then we were just going to do it all with puppets. We had all these great puppeteers, but that didn’t work.

Ed Gale (adult “Howard the Duck” actor): I left my home in Michigan for California when I was 20 years old, with $41 in my pocket to pursue a career in acting. I learned months later that Universal had contacted Billy Barty and the Little People of America looking for a little person – pretty specific size, shape, and agility – for a movie. Because I had met Billy two months before, he gave them a few names and one was mine. They called and wanted to know if I would be interested in coming in and auditioning. It went in for a meet and greet. They were looking for someone 2’ 10” to 3’ 2” and I was two inches above their ceiling. I told them that they won’t find someone that short, proportioned, and agile. The smaller you get, the more disproportioned you get.

Willard Huyck: We decided that next best thing would be casting a young little person.

Jordan Prentice (child “Howard the Duck” actor): I had one little person friend who received a newsletter from the Little People of America. I was twelve at the time and had yet to receive my current 4’1” stature. They were going around North America, meeting with as many little people as they could, so I went to Toronto, about two hours from where I was living, to meet with one of the producers and a casting person. We had a conversation, I jumped up and down on the hotel bed to show my mobility, and they said, “You’re a little bit too tall.” Being “too tall” is something that never happened to me in my life. Several months passed and we received a call asking if I would still be interested in playing the part. I heard they had hired three eight-year-old dwarves to play Howard, and it turned out they couldn’t do it. They weren’t mature enough. They were frightened. One of them even peed his pants while working in the costume.

Ed Gale: They kept calling me back, touching base. Eventually they asked if I would consider stunt doubling and understudying for Howard because they had found a twelve-year-old boy to play him.

Jordan Prentice: They molded my entire body, like they would do to make a cast if I had fallen off a ski lift or something. From that they made molds for my hands and feet. The feathers on both my head and the hands were real feathers that had to be glued down and preened regularly throughout the day to keep them looking proper. I had gloves up half my wrists and fake legs in the shape of duck feet past my ankles. Then there was a bib for the chest area and a plastic skull-shaped thing that had been molded from my head with a series of servo connections on the side to work the eyes and mouth.

Ed Gale: Howard was the very first freestanding costume without wires attached. Yoda was half a puppet. E.T. was a full costume, but they still had a lot of cables coming out and he had to be shot from the waist up or the waist down. Howard was fully self-contained. The famous feathered butt contained the brain to make the eyes blink and eyeballs move. You would have to break the face movements down into every little piece – eyelids, eyebrows, eyeballs, cheeks, and lips. We had several puppeteers working those.

Tim Rose (Lead Animatronics Puppeteer): I got involved because of the previous work I had done on Return of the Jedi. I helped to build the creatures and I played Admiral Ackbar. They were having problems with the duck, so George called for me. I was back in England, but went to California to help out. The main reason I wanted to do the movie was because Howard was the leading man, but he was a puppet. At that time, historically, that had never really been done before. Needing to keep a character alive and loveable for the length of a movie was a tremendous challenge.

Willard Huyck: We probably auditioned every girl that age in Hollywood for the lead, Beverly Switzler. Cyndi Lauper came in. Lea was just great, very funny. George loved her in Back to the Future. We wanted someone who was spunky, who was not just a blonde bimbo.

Gloria Katz: And she could sing and dance.

Lea Thompson (“Beverly Switzler”): It was a really big deal to be able to audition for it. I was in Huntsville, Alabama shooting SpaceCamp, trying to buy jewelry so I could look like Madonna. Willard and Gloria were super jazzed that I dressed up for my audition at their house.

Gloria Katz: The cast was really great. A lot of it was night shooting, and everyone was very cooperative. Tim Robbins had been in another film, but we like to say we discovered him. We also discovered Holly Robinson.

Holly Robinson Peete (“K.C.,” Cherry Bomb): It was my last year at Sarah Lawrence in New York. I wanted to be a singer at the time. My mother, Dolores, was a very high-end manager and represented everyone from Wesley Snipes to Martin Sheen. I wasn’t really looking to get in the business, but my mom called and said, “Here’s a part where you could play a member of a band.”

Richard Edson (“Richie”): I didn’t audition. I had a little bit buzz around me after Stranger Than Paradise and Ferris Bueller. I did not want to do this at all. When I got into film, I had a more purist idea of what movies I wanted to be in. When I heard about this I was hesitant, but George Lucas was behind it. It was a totally cynical career move on my part. I went into it expecting very little.

Jeffrey Jones: There was a puppeteer who wanted to be a makeup artist and they said, “Why don’t you create Jeffrey’s makeup for the Dark Overlord?” The guy didn’t have a clue. I called it a day when he painted me blue. No brushes, he was using finger paint. I looked like the Blue Man Group. Then they hired Tom and Bari Burman, who were real makeup artists. I was happy they did.

Tom Burman (special effects makeup): We got a call from ILM. They had done some tests and Willard Huyck was not pleased with them. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of time. They asked if we were interested and we said we certainly were. George had called me to do Star Wars. I thought, “Star Wars? What a stupid name.” It sounded like one of those hokey Buck Rogers things, so I said. “No, thank you.” That was probably one of my biggest mistakes. So when the opportunity came around, I chose to do Howard the Duck.

PART II: “SEE, I’M IN THIS BAND…CHERRY BOMB.” – Beverly Switzler

Willard Huyck: We were aware of Thomas Dolby’s famous song, “She Blinded Me With Science.” We listened to a lot of John Williams scores, but decided to try and do something different. The original plan was to have Tom do the score, but then he ended up doing just the Cherry Bomb stuff.

Allee Willis (co-writer of Cherry Bomb songs): Thomas and I were friends. They asked him to score the movie and he said he would, if he could write the title song and do all the girls’ music. He had started the track for “Howard the Duck” with George Clinton, who I always loved, so I agreed to work with him when he asked. I thought that would be a great opportunity. The three of us wrote that song together, even though, to this day, I’ve never met George Clinton.

George Clinton (co-writer of the title song): That was an interesting time, working with Thomas Dolby and the girls. He and I had done something together on his album, we were both on Capitol, and then he got commissioned to do Howard the Duck. He had some futuristic sounds and ideas.

Holly Robinson Peete: He was so in a zone creatively. The way he was knocking out these songs was unbelievable. But the timing wasn’t really on our side. If he released those songs on a soundtrack today, they would be hits.

Allee Willis: Because Thomas was doing the entire film, he really had a vision of what he wanted, so I was writing according to ideas he had already sketched out. Howard the Duck really fell within the kinds of stuff I was writing at the time. We wrote four original songs that the band Cherry Bomb performed – “Don’t Turn Away” was one. “It Don’t Come Cheap,” “Hunger City,” and, of course, “Howard the Duck” were other songs the band played.

Lea Thompson: I like “Hunger City.” They’re all pretty good songs.

Holly Robinson Peete: My favorite song is “Don’t Turn Away.” It was a ballad. I sang lead on it, and then did all the background vocals. My recollection is that Lea wanted to sing the lead, so they went back and rerecorded it. To this day, that song is still one of my favorites.

Willard Huyck: Tom worked with the girls a lot. We had a choreographer, and then Tom worked with them on the rock and roll music.

Lea Thompson: There was always the thing hanging over my head that they might dub me. They weren’t really sure about my voice, so I worked really hard on that. I didn’t have any vocal training, and the worst thing is that I didn’t stand up for myself. I should have done a couple things in different keys.

Holly Robinson Peete: Thomas really wanted us to look like we knew what we were doing. Lea was shooting already and sort of fitting rehearsals in around her schedule. I was already a musician, so I knew how to play an instrument. Not well enough to play on the track, but I could hit those chords. I wish they had been better documented. That would have been unbelievable footage.

Lea Thompson: The hardest thing was that I had to learn how to play guitar. We shot the movie for six months and I never had a day off. I was always rehearsing, or recording, or doing something. I was so exhausted by the end. Holly Robinson was a really good singer. They were all more accomplished musicians than me.

PART III: “IF GOD HAD INTENDED US TO FLY, HE WOULDN’T HAVE TAKEN AWAY OUR WINGS.” – Howard the Duck

Jeffrey Jones: Poor Willard and Gloria had such problems. The studio said, “Okay, make it,” then they decided how much they were going to spend on the movie, and it just wasn’t enough. I suspect it cost more in the long run than if they would have adequately financed it from the start.

Photo: Everett Collection

Lea Thompson: I had an amazing hairdo and it was a nightmare. I don’t even know how I have hair on my head. Six months of crimping. They’d spray it with Aqua Net that would come off in white clumps. It was ridiculous. I remember saying, “Just get me a wig,” and they were like, “That’s too expensive.” How could it be too expensive to get me a wig? Recently the hairdresser from Howard worked on my TV show, Switched at Birth, and I literally had a physical reaction. My hair got scared.

Gloria Katz: It’s just very frustrating for writer/directors because it exists in your head in perfect form, and then to get it on the screen is just so hard. You don’t have another voice. It’s very difficult to stand back and put on your other hat.

Tom Burman: They were making the duck at ILM. I don’t remember how many different versions they had. They were all mechanical – beautiful mechanics by the way – but it looked just like what it was, a mechanical head on a mechanical duck. It just wasn’t working.

Bari Burman (special effects makeup): It had plastic eyes. That was really was the problem. Howard was such an animated character, and to not have the soul of the actor’s actual eye – you lost so much. It has to be a marriage. If we were doing it now, we would be able to keep the actor’s eyes and do CGI to make him more personal.

Tom Burman: When I got back home after I saw the duck for the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had a friend of mine who was a dwarf. I did sketches of him with prosthetics on and took them back to Willard and Gloria. I said, “I think I have an idea that would really make this duck work.” They looked at the sketches and said, “I don’t understand why you did this.” I said, “I felt I needed to,” and they said, “But we love the duck.” That ended that. We really deeply cared, but they had something they enjoyed. But it was hard for me because the whole film hung on whether the duck was successful or not.

A team of technicians works to maintain Howard the Duck during a break in filming.Photo: Universal

Lea Thompson: All the sequences took a really long time to film. It was a strange time for special effects. I have the feeling that actors that are in Star Trek and Fantastic Four don’t work as long as we did back then. We had to do more of the special effects in real time. They just took forever. Nobody was coming in and computer animating the whole thing. I just didn’t exist. If it were ten or twenty years later, it would have been much easier on the actors.

Willard Huyck: We carried around the backgrounds for all our scenes on a truck, so that as we improved the duck, we would do the close ups over again. George was used to working like this. Even on the first Star Wars, nothing worked. Having gone through that, he kept saying, “Don’t worry, you can fix that later,” but it was depressing as it was happening. The first day we shot the duck, its mouth opened so wide that all the flesh tore and you could see inside. It was like the Terminator. I just thought, “Oh man, this is going to be tough.”

Lea Thompson: People were too obsessed with the duck working. I kept saying, “Just shoot so we only see the back of its head.” My nickname was “Dawn” because they would shoot this duck’s close up before mine, and they’d shoot mine at dawn. It’d be like, one take. It was all about that stupid duck. That was brutal.

Willard Huyck: George has always said that when he was directing, which he didn’t particularly like to do in the beginning, that he’d only get ten percent of what he needed each day. He’d hope for fifty and get ten because of time constraints and money. One day the first assistant director walked around telling us how much it was costing us each minute, which was cruel and dumb. You finally have to say, “This is the best we can do right now.” If we continued working on it more, we probably could have made everything better, but we didn’t have enough time.

Gloria Katz: We discussed with George in great length when to use the puppets and when to use the little people. You have to remember, we were always on a schedule. You have to shoot fast and puppets are sometimes slow. To get a puppet to across a room was a nightmare. It was extremely difficult because the puppet duck didn’t match the child duck, and they didn’t match the grown up duck. It’s very difficult to make a movie when you don’t have the right technology.

Willard Huyck: it was really difficult for the kid. It was like the man in the iron mask. He had to wear that thing for hours.

Jordan Prentice: My burden was that the eyes would fog up very easily. It was really difficult to see out of them, probably seventy-five percent of the time. They took to putting a hair dryer in the mouth with the heating coil removed so it would cool me down and, hopefully, de-fog the eyes. In addition to that, the servos were quite close to my face, running along my cheek. I could hear them going, “whirr, whirr, whirr,” and at times they would heat up and it would be painful.

Jeffrey Jones: They had to sew him into the costume. They’d get him already, go to shoot, and he’d have to go to the bathroom. It would be another hour and half of getting him in and out of the costume so he could pee.

Jordan Prentice: Child labor laws dictated that I could only work a certain number of hours a day. Production quickly went over budget and over time. It was not a well-organized set. There was a lot of tension. Ed Gale began to replace me because of the hours he could work. He was 21 or 22 at the time and could work ridiculously long hours, which he did.

Ed Gale: Jordan did a lot of the still photos that you see in Howard’s apartment and the picture on the driver’s license. There were some scenes on Duckworld where Howard was crashing through the building. There were ducks in every room Howard went through, and Jordan was most of them.

Holly Robinson Peete: Jordan struggled. They would sometimes have him in scenes where he was supposed to be a curmudgeon and flirt with Lea. Howard was a little nasty duck! Jordan didn’t have that experience.

Lea Thompson: When they had to do the love scene, I was like, “I can’t do this scene with a kid.”

Jordan Prentice: I didn’t care whether or not I did that scene, but my guardian was really against it.

Willard Huyck: Obviously we thought that scene was funny, the idea that she might actually go to bed with a duck. I’m always surprised how people who become offended by things that are pretty silly. There was a really nice older man at Universal that called us one day, sometime after the movie had opened. He had to prepare these movies for airplane flights. We went to lunch with him and said, “There are just a few cuts we’d like to make in the movie. Does she have to go to bed with a duck?” At that point I said, “Let them get their money out of the airplane. You can shorten the scene.”

Ed Gale: That scene was more playful that anything. I cannot believe how many idiots watched the movie with both eyes opened and complained. They did not have sex. Howard was being the playboy that he always was in Steve Gerber’s comics from the ’70s. Thirty years later, I ask everybody who mentions, “When did they say ‘sex?’ Why do you have to make this stuff up in your own heads?”

Richard Edson: We were working in this place called the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. That’s where they shot the rock show. It was the first time I had to work with the duck. The actor inside kept bitching and moaning about getting water, and they were bending over backwards to take care of the little guy inside of the suit. I kept wondering, “Who the fuck is in there?” We never saw him on set because he showed up dressed, and after his part, they took him the back room to get him out of the suit. It was funny because they had fifteen guys trailing behind him with all the animatronic gizmos. We kept filming the scene and, a half hour later, the guy playing Howard the Duck emerges. He had this little jacket on with a coat of arms, an ascot, wing tip shoes, and a little ivory-tipped cane. I was just so shocked by how ridiculous the whole thing was.

Holly Robinson Peete: Ed was such a cool cat. We loved hanging out with him. Jordan had to be with his parents and we had to watch our language around him. I definitely preferred the NC-17 duck as opposed to the G-rated one. He had a great attitude, he was fun, he was flirtatious, he was cool, and he was an adult.

Ed Gale: I could barely see while in the suit. When Howard was talking, I could catch glimpses. I would use marks on the floor to see where I was. Everybody has a natural ability; I had the uncanny ability to always know where I was. I knew how many steps I was away from someone. If you wanted me to hit a mark ten feet away, I would walk backwards and just count my steps. That was my hidden talent. We would rehearse a lot of it backwards and the animatronics team would keep the mouth open, so I could look down and see. I could tell Lea from Jeffrey from Tim, just based on their shoes.

Tim Rose: There were five of us, including Ed, who were all necessary to bringing the duck alive. There was the full body version with Ed in the costume, and we ran a radio-controlled face. There was a hand puppet version for close ups that was done Muppet-style, with the other guys working the other aspects of the face.

Lea Thompson: There’s one scene where we are in the diner – it took three weeks to shoot that. That’s insane. The scene where we’re at the very end and the Dark Overlord is there. We were filming in that huge, cold bunker for a month, and there’s no place colder than San Francisco when you’re in a mini skirt and a torn blouse.

Jeffrey Jones: Willard and Gloria had a daughter who was three then. She was fine with me normally, but every time I would be on set in my Dark Overlord makeup, she’d be absolutely terrified. It wasn’t cute. She was really scared.

Willard Huyck: I heard a scream. Lea came over and said, “My God, I’ve never seen anybody run so fast.” I went running across the stage and I realized our nanny had come with our daughter. Jeffrey was so humiliated and apologetic.

Jordan Prentice: During the showdown with the Dark Overlord, I was driving that machine you always see in the villain’s’ lair of James Bond films. I drove through a series of timed explosives and I could hear my guardian scream, “Feathers! Feathers!” That was confusing. She was not the most street-savvy person. The feathers on my head had caught fire from one of the explosives, and instead of yelling “Fire!,” she yells, “Feathers!” Under the feathers on my head was polyurethane, which melts like candle wax, but faster. All of a sudden, I felt someone beating me in the back of my head. I was thinking, “Has it come to this? Did I not get it right and they’re actually hitting me?” It turned out to be my dresser beating the flames out with his bare hands.

Jeffrey Jones: Crews would get fired on a regular basis, and it was not necessarily because they weren’t doing well. People had to get fired because there had to be a reason that we weren’t making the progress that we should have been making.

Willard Huyck: George advised us to tell the crew that we were done with principle photography, and just say we were doing continuing on with second unit photography. That worked for a while, until they caught on.

Lea Thompson: In my entire thirty-four year career in Hollywood, I’ve only really lost my temper once – and that was to George Lucas. We were shooting the big sequence on stage when I’m singing “Howard the Duck.” I was really nervous and the hair and makeup people were freaking out, and freaking me out. He came in the trailer and was like, “When are you guys going to be ready,” or something like that. It was perfectly nice, but I remember looking in the mirror and seeing a thermometer. I turned red and said, “I will come as soon as I am ready!” I’m super-embarrassed and want to apologize to Mr. Lucas right now. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been cast in a Star Wars movie.

Willard Huyck: The other casting that went on forever was the voice of Howard. Everybody from Robin Williams to every sort of comedian came in. People seemed to enjoy flying up to San Francisco to do tests.

Gloria Katz: George has this big conceptual idea. He didn’t want to cast a star to do the voice, because he felt that then it became about the star and not the duck, so Chip Zien, who is a very well known Broadway actor, was the voice of Howard.

Lea Thompson: The way they voiced the duck on set was so mechanical. It was impossible to tell jokes that way. It was very difficult for us as actors, and especially as comedians, because we had puppeteers doing jokes. Maybe they were actors, but they weren’t great comedians. Then you’d have to try and pick it up. It was really difficult to be funny. If you can have the actual voice actor saying lines for the character on set, like Bob Zemeckis did with Roger Rabbit, it really helps. People tend to underestimate the power of timing.

Jeffrey Jones: When we were in San Francisco. I’d go to comic book stores and buy up all the Howard the Duck comics I could find. I thought if the film were successful, I’d be able to sell them. I still have them. Anybody want some Howard the Duck comics?

PART IV: “HOSTILITY IS LIKE A PSYCHIC BOOMERANG” – Cajun Sushi restaurant waitress

Lea Thompson: The reviews didn’t matter that much to me. What was really upsetting was how badly it did at the box office. It was upsetting that nobody went because you knew how expensive the movie was. Back to the Future and Howard the Duck opened very close to being within a year of each other. It was an experience to go through such a hit and such a bomb in the same year.

Tim Rose: It was the only movie I had done that I would be getting royalties on, so I was hoping it would be quite successful.

Willard Huyck: I think we left the country. We took a little vacation, which was the best thing for the first few weeks. There are movies like Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate and Howard that become targets when they fail. Of course, Howard the Duck – the title – helps when you’re writing a bad review. The good news is, initially, whenever articles talked about the biggest Hollywood flops, Howard the Duck would be in there, but after thirty years, it has descended from that top spot.

Holly Robinson Peete: I remember this giant billboard on Sunset, with a duck’s beak protruding from it and smoke coming out. It was the coolest billboard I’ve seen to this day. I really got the feeling I was in something that was going to be special. Once I saw the movie at the premiere, I didn’t know whether or not it was going to be received well. I really didn’t ever think it would be a flop. We had all the things to make it a hit. There was a part of me that thought the movie wasn’t amazing, but I thought people would eat it up. The Marvel comic crowd had enough of a fan base. Then there was George Lucas, and that billboard.

Tim Rose: Howard is the most difficult professional job I’ve ever had, and the one I’m most proud of. I think we succeeded nicely. No matter what people say about the way it looked, we kept him alive in every scene of that movie.

Willard Huyck: The screenings went all right. People laughed.

Gloria Katz: I did the response cards. We had to give them all to the studio, but the negative ones I tore up so we could say, “Hey, we got a ninety-five percent on the screening!” Maybe we could have had a more Ted-like tone.

Willard Huyck: It could have been edgier and dirtier, but Universal wanted a family movie. I don’t think people understood the tone. It was a mixture of monster science fiction and humor.

Gloria Katz: I knew we were in trouble when we did a press tour and the Foreign Press went, “Who exactly is this movie for?” But like most disasters, there’s a silver lining. When it went to Japan, it became a phenomenal success. We would always say, “Well, it was big in Japan.”

Holly Robinson Peete: There were several visions working at once. There were several narratives happening. People weren’t on the same page between the studio, George, Willard, and Gloria. I’m not sure if they knew exactly the movie they were trying to make.

Lea Thompson: The comic books were so great, and inspired, and floppy, and messy. The movie was too smoothed out. It was a difficult tone to hit.

Gloria Katz: When it was released in England, we also had to take out the duck bed scene. By this time we had been beaten down we just told them to do it. There was also some problem with Jeffrey’s tongue coming out and getting power from the cigarette lighter. The English didn’t like that.

Lea Thompson: I had just done a love scene with my son in Back to the Future and nobody seemed to be too upset about that. I thought it was hilarious. That’s my sense of humor. My biggest regret about that scene is that it the reason my kids have never seen me sing “Howard the Duck” in front of the giant egg. They have to turn it off at the love scene.

Jeffrey Jones: I don’t think I saw the whole thing until just before we had to go trot out the canned stories for the press. Sometimes, if they’re not all that confident they have a winner, they want to keep things quiet until the last moment, and then give a movie a blast of publicity in hopes of selling as many tickets as possible before everybody says it’s a stinker.

Willard Huyck: It hurt the film ultimately. At the time there it was this very strict thing. You couldn’t show the duck. The studio was behind that, I guess just to build some kind of suspense.

Lea Thompson: I’m happy with my performance. I worked my butt off and I sold a lot of absolutely impossible things. That was our job. I sold that duck. I was in love with that duck, which was nearly impossible to act. I’ve never been ashamed of my work in that movie. That was some of the hardest work to do.

Ed Gale: The first time I saw the movie was at a theater in Palm Springs near my home. I was cordially uninvited to the premiere and asked to not attend. They figured, if there’s a little person there, he must be Howard the Duck. They wanted to hide the fact that Howard was a little person. I felt it was another way of discrediting me, and, because of the credits, everyone thinks eight little people played Howard. That’s not to say that the puppeteers weren’t a part of Howard too, but I was inside the suit. That was the only little piece that hurt, but then I realized what Gloria and Willard were aiming for. They wanted audiences to see Howard the Duck the character, not Howard the Duck the little person.

Allee Willis: I did not have great feelings about the film. At the screening they made everyone put on these duckbills and I just thought, “This has got to be the most surreal photo ever taken.” If you were involved with the film, you already knew it was not going to fly.

Willard Huyck: At the premiere they had trained a hundred trained ducks walk in a row through the banquet hall. Oh my God, that was so corny! By that time there was already word that things were not going to go well.

Gloria Katz: We had a big screening at Grauman’s, then we went to the Beverly Hilton. It was a typical Hollywood party. Our very good friends made beelines to the studio head, Frank Price, to tell him how wonderful the picture was. Everybody we know we were having a terrible experience, and obviously we were not thrilled when Steve Gerber started badmouthing the movie.

Carrie Lee and Hugh Hefner attending the “Howard the Duck” Los Angeles premiere in July of 1986.Photo: Getty Images

Allee Willis: A film has to be disastrously bad in a different way to be kitsch, as in they didn’t have enough money to spend on production. If someone slams the door, the walls shake. Howard the Duck wasn’t bad in that sense. It was just fairly boring. It was reminiscent of a lot of films that were out at the time, but not as good. People were really getting in to special effects then, so the duck just seemed too cheap, and not in a funny way.

Gloria Katz: It actually wasn’t a financial bomb. What amazes me is that some pictures just get absolutely steam rolled, and other financial bombs just go unscathed. Crimson Peak cost a fortune and it just disappeared. No one trashed anyone.

PART V: “HOWARD THE DUCK IS READY TO FIGHT” – Howard the Duck

Willard Huyck: A few years later, when we made another film with George, he kept saying, “You know, if they show this film fifty years in the future, and they show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and someone’s asked which one was the hit, they’re going to say Howard the Duck.” We kept saying, “George, we’ll be dead in fifty years. It’ll be too late.”

Holly Robinson Peete: Tim Robbins and I are still friends. He’s probably one of the most fun people I’ve ever had a chance to work with. We were on a plane together recently, just catching up. We talked about what if Howard the Duck was filmed today, with the different resources we would have. The duck would work better and it would just be a different movie.

Jeffrey Jones: You never know how things are going to turn out. Frequently actors are not blamed for the movies they are in because we don’t really have any power. You do what you are asked and hope that the editor treats it kindly.

Lea Thompson: I’ve definitely experienced press bullying for a long time. It’s intense when people turn on a movie like that. It’s just fun to pick on things. We all do it. But I’ve always been an iconoclast. I appreciate people who like things that aren’t particularly popular, who have their own sense of what they like and aren’t swayed by the mass media. That’s why I love my Howard the Duck fans, because they’ve had a rough time of it. It’s not a popular position.

Ed Gale: In the industry, they want to play the game. It comes off as jealousy, but it can’t be. “You were in Howard the Duck, why do you put that on your resume? If I were in that movie, I wouldn’t put that on my resume.” Well, yeah, you would. I was in the movie and I’m proud to have that on my resume. I did a movie called Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. Howard the Duck isn’t that bad.

Holly Robinson Peete: I took it off my resume. I wasn’t exactly running around telling people I was in Howard the Duck at first. I graduated, and then got 21 Jump Street, so it wasn’t like I ever needed to talk about it.

Lea Thompson: It’s funny to me that people keep acting like I care when someone puts it down. So many people tell me they love the movie, sometimes with tears in their eyes. I see more of that in my real life, so when people are snotty about Howard the Duck, I just tell them that a lot of people really liked it, and that means more to me than people who want to try and make me feel embarrassed or bad about a movie I think I did good work in. I didn’t edit it, I didn’t write it, and I didn’t create the duck. I did the best job I could and I’m proud of that.

Val Mayerik: I’ve been going to a lot of comic conventions lately and people bring the old Howard the Duck comics to my table. Some of them were probably only six or seven-years-old when the movie came out, and they talk about it very fondly. To them it was just like watching any of these 80’s films that became popular, like Indiana Jones. It was just a fun movie. People who were really aficionados of the books were disappointed, but it seems like the movie was a positive thing for the character for some people that saw the movie but never read the comics.

Willard Huyck: Gloria and I haven’t seen it in a long time. A friend of ours, just a week ago, said, “My God, I finally saw Howard the Duck and it’s outrageous. It’s great.” I have no idea if he’s right. Usually when I look at the things I’ve done, I just remember the pain of doing it.

Holly Robinson Peete: When my kids saw it, they went nuts. They were like, “What in the…what are you…you’re with a duck…you’re dancing…you’re singing…what is happening?” They were blown away by it. One of them said, “Mom, I bet this movie made millions and millions at the box office,” and I just said, “Well, I’ll let you Google that one, son.”

Lea Thompson: Trust me, there are a lot of bad movies being made. To be in one that has been remembered so well is kind of a feather in my cap.

Holly Robinson Peete: I love the fact that, retroactively, this is a movie we could all be proud of, especially since, at the time, it was rough. I thought this movie was going to be a hit and I was going to be a part of this group called Cherry Bomb in real life. I was going to graduate college and become a music star. Today, that’s totally doable. You can name groups like Fifth Harmony that have come out of movies and TV shows that actually go on to sell records or chart on iTunes. I was really excited about the possibilities.

Lea Thompson: It was great to see Howard the Duck in Guardians of the Galaxy the way I always imagined he should look. He was just like in the cartoon, floppy and grungy. Watching it made me feel like I had made the silent movie version of Ben-Hur and then got to see the one in Technicolor.

Ed Gale: I just don’t see them making another straight up Howard the Duck movie. They keep making Superman movies because Superman can sell tickets. I don’t think Howard is strong enough to hold a complete movie anymore, but he could definitely be a good sidekick, like Rocket Raccoon. I don’t think he could hold his own movie either, but I could see Howard having a bigger role in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but it’s up to the people like Stan Lee and the geniuses of this industry to determine who can hold their whole weight.

Lea Thompson: I’m a hundred percent sure they would not want to associate with the first Howard the Duck if they made a second one, but that would be so badass. “We don’t care what you think, we’re making a new one.” I think they should, but with CGI and a great actor doing his voice. Someone who could improv, and then they could animate to that. That would be cool.

Holly Robinson Peete: I would definitely do another Howard. I was single and childless thirty years ago, now I’ve got four kids and have been married twenty years. That would definitely be an aging rock star moment, but I would love it.

Lea Thompson: It’s cool that we’re still talking about it after thirty years. That’s pretty badass, as far as I’m concerned.

Willard Huyck: Whether or not they should reboot Howard the Duck isn’t the question. The question is whether anyone has the nerve to do another Howard the Duck?

Gloria Katz: I don’t think they would, but they’re remaking all these other things people have never heard of, so who knows?